After its succès de scandale in France in 1856, Flaubert's Madame Bovary was widely adapted, sometimes so closely they were dismissed as plagiarism yet they achieved canonical status in their national traditions. This study traces Madame Bovary's journey abroad and asks why the novel was given such import in foreign literatures.

Some eighteen film directors from France to the United States, Germany to India, have applied themselves to the task of adapting Madame Bovary to the screen. Why has Flaubert's 1857 classic novel been so popular with filmmakers? What challenges have they had to meet? What ideologies do their adaptations serve? Madame Bovary at the Movies seeks to answer these questions, avoiding value judgments based on the notion of fidelity to the novel. In-depth analyses are reserved for the studio films of Renoir, Minnelli and Chabrol and the small-screen adaptation of Fywell. As the first book-length examination of the Madame Bovary adaptations, this volume, in addition to its pedagogical applications, will be a useful reference for scholars of literature and film and for those interested in the burgeoning field of adaptation studies.

Modernity's Metonyms considers the representation of temporal frameworks in stories by the nineteenth-century Spanish authors, Leopoldo Alas and Antonio Ros de Olano. Adopting a metonymic approach_exploring the reiteration of specific associations across a range of disciplines, from literature, philosophy, historiography, to natural history_Modernity's Metonyms moves beyond the consideration of nineteenth-century Spanish literary modernity in terms of the problem of representation. Through an exploration of the associations prompted by three themes, the railway, food, and suicide, it argues that literary modernity can be considered as the expression of the perception that a linear model of time bringing together the past, the present and the future, was fragmenting into a proliferation of simultaneous moments. It draws French, German, American and British writers into discussion of stories by the canonical author Alas, and Ros de Olano, an author who is receiving increasing attention from scholars of nineteenth-century Spanish literature. Recent scholarship in the field of nineteenth-century Spanish literature and culture has challenged the thesis of 'retraso,' the thesis that Spain lagged far behind its European neighbors. Building on this scholarship, this monograph incorporates shorter works of experimental prose fiction into discussions of nineteenth-century literary modernity in Spain. It further expands the field by combining analysis of the writing of the canonical author, Leopoldo Alas with stories by Antonio Ros de Olano, whose work has been receiving increasing attention from scholars in the field. Rather than thinking of these works in terms of the ways they conform to established models provided by either contemporaneous French and British works, or by fin de siglo and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, Modernity's Metonyms works inductively. It builds outwards from the seven stories studies, identifying patterns of associations shared with writing by figures as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, Thomas Carlyle, Emilio Castelar, Briere de Boismont, P.J. Cabanis, or Jean-Anselme Brillat-Savarin. The seven stories discussed are Alas's 'Do-a Berta,' 'Zurita,' 'Cuervo' and 'Cuento futuro,' and Ros de Olano's 'Jornadas de retorno escritas por un aparecido,' 'Maese Cornelio TOcito,' and 'La noche de mOscaras.'

Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil.

This volume conceives of identity constructs in a broader semiotic way, specifically within a communicational and comparative perspective. This implies a rethinking of “identity” in terms of the relationship between an individual’s “way of being” and performativity. The contributions here cover a variety of pre-texts, texts and contexts, periods and genres, from Medieval clothing to multicultural discourse, and from modern poetry to postcolonial narratives, among others. Integrating research from Germany, Greece, Iraq and Romania, this collection of fifteen chapters will be of interest to all those involved in the reevaluation of identity – a central term in the social and cultural space.

How did realist fiction alter in the effort to craft forms and genres receptive to the dynamism of an expanding empire and globalizing world? Do these nineteenth-century variations on the "geopolitical aesthetic" continue to resonate today? Crossing literary criticism, political theory, and longue durée history, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic explores these questions from the standpoint of nineteenth-century novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Anthony Trollope, as well as successors including E. M. Forster and the creators of recent television serials. By looking at the category of "sovereignty" at multiple scales and in diverse contexts, Lauren M. E. Goodlad shows that the ideological crucible for "high" realism was not a hegemonic liberalism. It was, rather, a clash of modern liberal ideals struggling to distintricate themselves from a powerful conservative vision of empire while striving to negotiate the inequalities of power which a supposedly universalistic liberalism had helped to generate. The material occasion for the Victorian era's rich realist experiments was the long transition from an informal empire of trade that could be celebrated as liberal to a neo-feudal imperialism that only Tories could warmly embrace. The book places realism's geopolitical aesthetic at the heart of recurring modern experiences of breached sovereignty, forgotten history, and subjective exile. The Coda, titled "The Way We Historicize Now", concludes the study with connections to recent debates about "surface reading", "distant reading", and the hermeneutics of suspicion.